


Stranded

by HermioneGirl96



Category: Carry On - Rainbow Rowell, Simon Snow & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Awkwardness, Blizzards & Snowstorms, Exes, Gen, POV Agatha Wellbelove, POV First Person, Platonic Cuddling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 10:26:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14567004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HermioneGirl96/pseuds/HermioneGirl96
Summary: After leaving Baz's house and dropping Penny off in London, Simon and Agatha get stranded in a ditch in the middle of a snowstorm. Ex awkwardness ensues.





	Stranded

**Author's Note:**

> This is canon-divergent in two ways: first, it imagines Simon went with Penny and Agatha when they all left the Grimm-Pitch manor on Christmas, and secondly, it imagines that the Wellbeloves don’t live in London. Please work with me on this.

It was barely snowing when we left Baz’s house, but, by the time we got to London, the windshield wipers were having trouble keeping up with the snow that kept engulfing the windshield, and my headlights could barely cut through the flurries of white swirling before us enough to see the next car. We dropped Penny off at her house and Simon moved from the backseat to the passenger’s seat, and then we were off again, slowly. 

We’d gotten maybe fifteen miles outside of London—most of those fifteen miles in a silence whose tenseness I couldn’t gauge—when we must have hit a patch of ice, because suddenly the car was spinning. I kept my hands on the wheel and tried to brake, but I didn’t know what to do, and the car didn’t seem to respond to anything I did anyway. Penny would probably have a spell to make everything better, because that was her bloody specialty, but I didn’t, so I held on like a Normal and fought for control of the car until it came to a stop in the ditch, trying to ignore Simon’s yelling and swearing. At least we were right-side-up. 

I tried the gas pedal a few times to see if we could just drive out of this situation, but it seemed like the snow in the ditch was too deep for us to move. Reluctantly, I fished my wand out of my purse and pointed it at the steering wheel. “ ** _Right as rain_** ,” I tried. Nothing happened. “ ** _Back on track. On the road again._** ” Nothing. 

“I wish I could fly. I wish I could fly. I wish I could fly,” Simon kept muttering. 

“Simon. That’s not even a spell.”

“It worked when Penny and I got stranded when the Humdrum summoned us away last year,” he protested. “I grew wings.” 

I felt my eyes widening, but I just shook my head. “Well, apparently it’s not going to work this time.” 

“And everything you’re doing is working so much better,” he shot back. 

I slumped in my seat, and Simon immediately said, “Sorry.” 

“Maybe I should spell the snow away from the tyres,” I realised out loud, so I turned off the car. I got out, shivering immediately from the cold wind, and crouched down beside the front tyre on the driver’s side and used **_You’re getting warmer_** to melt the snow. Then I moved on to the passenger side and did the same thing, and then I progressed to the back tyres. I could feel my power reserves getting sapped, even from just doing one simple spell four times. Mother was always so disappointed in how little power I had. 

When I’d cleared the snow away from all four tyres, I got back in the car, buckled my seatbelt, turned the key in the ignition, and tried to drive. We got maybe half a metre before we ran up against more snow than we could drive through, so I put the car in park. I ground my teeth and hit the steering wheel once to express my frustration. 

“Can you spell the snow away again?” Simon asked. 

“I’m running out of magic,” I replied. 

“Take some of mine,” Simon offered, holding out a hand toward me. 

The second-to-last thing I wanted to do was hold hands with my ex, but the last thing I wanted was to remain stuck here, so I took his hand and tried to access his power. It felt like I was touching a hot stove, but nothing flowed into me. Simon screwed up his face, either because he was concentrating or because he wanted me to think he was, but nothing happened. 

Finally, Simon dropped my hand. “I don’t know what’s going wrong. It was easy with Penny and Baz.” 

I shrugged. “Maybe it’s because we’re exes.” 

“If it’s about not liking each other, shouldn’t it have been harder with Baz, though?” Simon asked.

Something was off in his voice, though. It almost sounded the way he sounded when he lied. Of course, he and Baz _didn’t_ like each other—they hated each other and always had—so there was no reason for him to sound that way . . . right? Suddenly I wasn’t so sure. They’d been—not friendly, exactly, but _close_ , when we’d been at Baz’s house today. Like neither of them wanted any distance from the other, and not just in Simon’s usual “I need to keep tabs on Baz” kind of way. Which is why I replied, “You tell me.” 

Simon’s face fell, and he muttered, “We kissed last night.” 

I gasped, but then his words sank in and I frowned. “Simon, you’re not even gay.” 

Simon ran a hand through his already-messy hair. “Can either of us be sure about that? Were we ever in love, Agatha?”

I opened my mouth to respond and then shut it again. Finally, I said, “I don’t know. I think we were in love with the idea of being in love.” 

Simon nodded. “Yeah, that sounds about right.” 

I looked out the windshield and said, “Is there anything you can do to get this car moving?”

“You know how bad I am with spells,” Simon replied. 

“Okay, yeah. And I’d rather you didn’t blow up the car.” 

Then I realised that I had my mobile phone. I was so used to being at Watford and not having it that it took me until then to remember. I got it out, unlocked it, and dialled my parents. My mother picked up and said, “Hello?” because we still didn’t have caller ID. 

“Hi, Mum,” I said. 

“Agatha Madeline Wellbelove.” My mother’s tone had steel in it. “You were supposed to be home hours ago.” 

“Well, Simon and I are stuck in a ditch, and I’m not sure we’re going to get home at all,” I retorted. “Can you or Dad come and get us? We’re about fifteen miles past London.” 

“Honey, if you spun out, I’m not sure your father or I would be safe on the roads either. Can you and Simon hang tight until tomorrow morning?”

“Tomorrow _morning_?” I repeated. 

“I’m sorry, honey, but you’re asking us to risk our lives to come get you, and I think it would be better for all of us to stay safe where we are until the plows get out.” 

If I were Simon, I would have growled. As it was, I sighed and then said, “I understand.” 

“Good. Good luck, sweetie. Call if anything changes.” 

_Like what?_ I almost asked, but then I thought better of it. “Okay. Thanks, Mum,” I said, and then I hung up. 

“So we’re stuck,” Simon said. 

“Right,” I said. “Well, if I leave the car running, we’ll probably die of carbon monoxide poisoning before my parents come get us tomorrow, so I should turn off the car.” I took my own advice and turned the key in the ignition. “Unfortunately, this means we can’t leave the heat on, so it’s going to get cold.” 

“I could try to warm us up?” Simon suggested, but he sounded unsure. 

“Over my dead body,” I retorted. “You’d boil us from the inside out.” 

“I’m just trying to be helpful,” he shot back. 

“Yeah, well, don’t.” 

It was quiet for a minute, and then Simon asked, “Can we call Penny?” 

“Why is that your solution to _everything_?”

“Because she _knows_ everything!”

“Oh, right, and I’m the dumb blonde,” I replied. 

“ _Agatha_.” Simon huffed. “I didn’t mean it like that. And we both know Penny’s smarter than either of us.” 

“No, Simon, we’re not calling Penny, because I know what to do. I’ve seen it on telly. If you’re stranded in a snowstorm, you have to huddle for warmth.” 

Simon stared at me. “What exactly do you mean?”

I played with my hair and didn’t look at him. “I don’t want to start right now, because it’s still pretty warm in here and that would be unnecessary, but we should maybe start when it gets dark. It would probably be easiest for me to sit in your lap. Um. Practically speaking, I mean.” 

Simon scratched the back of his neck. “Right. Practically speaking.” 

We didn’t say much for the next couple of hours. I wanted to play something on my phone, but I couldn’t afford to let the battery die, so I turned it off instead, after texting my mother to tell her that I was going to do that. Mostly Simon and I just stared out the windows. I wondered what was on his mind. I was mostly thinking about the party I was missing, and how I wasn’t actually sad to be missing it. The best part of the party had always been showing off Simon and being envied as the Chosen One’s chosen one. But that had been more about the status than it had actually been about Simon. 

Had it always been this hard to talk to him? I couldn’t remember. Certainly he’d never had a way with words, and he’d managed to offend me on more than a few occasions. But surely it had been at least a little easier prior to the breakup. Surely we’d had _something_ to talk about during all those years that we ate together four times a day. Or had all the conversation come from Penny? No, I’d talked about lacrosse, and horses, and we’d all talked a lot about the latest threats to Simon’s life. Yet now, with the lacrosse season over and the equestrian season long past, I found I had nothing to tell Simon, and I didn’t want to hear about the latest threats to his life, either. (Did that make me a bad person?) More than anything, I didn’t want to hear about him and Baz. I was pretty sure I wasn’t homophobic—Keris and Trixie had never bothered me—but the thought of Simon with someone else made me feel weird. I was fairly certain I was over Simon, and in fact I wasn’t sure I had ever loved him in the first place, but I had liked the hold I had over him, the way I knew he was still pining for me. And having that suddenly taken away was . . . destabilizing. 

I had turned all of that over in my head several times by the time the world started getting grayer. By that point, I could see my breath in what was left of the afternoon light. “It’s getting dark out,” I said.

“Do you want to climb over the gearshift?” Simon asked. 

“That’s probably the best option,” I replied, so I unbuckled my seatbelt and climbed over the gearshift and into Simon’s lap, stepping on his feet as I did so. I’d only sat in Simon’s lap a few times before—we’d so rarely gotten privacy, despite how many years we had dated—and this was far more awkward than any of those times, in part because I could feel the discomfort rolling off of Simon in smoky waves, though part of the fault also lay with the squished nature of the car seats. 

When I got settled, Simon wrapped his arms around me and asked, “Does this help?”

“Yeah,” I replied, because it did. His arms were warm. All of him was warm. Maybe that was why Baz liked him, since Baz was always cold. (It was still weird to think of Baz _liking_ him, come to think of it.)

“Okay,” said Simon. “Are we supposed to sleep?”

“If you can,” I replied. 

“I grew up in care homes. I can sleep through anything,” Simon said. 

“Okay.” 

I felt like a rag doll in his arms, which relaxed over the course of the next hour as Simon’s head drifted down onto my shoulder and his breathing became more even. It was strange, eerie even, to be awake in the dark car with Simon asleep beneath and around me. I listened to the sound of the wind and noted the rare passage of headlights along the road. Finally, when it had been dark for several hours, I heard a plow, and I opened my eyes, which I had closed in hopes of catching a bit of sleep, to watch it pass. 

The next thing I knew, my front half was freezing and I was surrounded by grey light. I blinked my eyes open and saw the dashboard in front of me. The windshield was covered in so much snow that I couldn’t see anything out of it, but the side windows were clear enough for me to make out the dawn to my left; the sky was beginning to be tinged with pink, but the sun had yet to crest the horizon. My breath was coming out in clouds before me and my hands and feet felt like ice. Luckily, though, my core seemed to be warm enough, thanks to my back pressing against Simon’s warm torso. 

I tried to fall back asleep, since I was still bone-tired, but no dice. I would probably have appreciated being in this position a year ago—in the arms of a sleeping Simon—but now I tried to ignore the fact that I was in his lap. My mind kept circling back to it, though, and I had a thought that surprised me: I hoped that nothing Simon and I had done to survive getting stranded caused any problems in Simon and Baz’s relationship. Simon was doing nothing wrong by holding me, after all; he was probably saving both of our lives. (As bloody usual.)

In an effort to distract myself, I tried to think about where I wanted to go to uni. Somewhere warm, I decided almost immediately. Somewhere where it didn’t snow like this, even on Christmas. Somewhere where I would never have to worry about getting stranded in a snowstorm with my ex. 

It was a couple of hours until Simon woke up, and only then did I feel free to move. I figured I shouldn’t leave his lap just yet in case it took my parents a long time to come get us, but I reached for my phone while Simon yawned and stretched, and, once it was turned on, I called home. 

“Hello?” my father answered, his voice deep like it was in the mornings. 

“Hi, Dad, it’s me, Agatha,” I said. “The plows have been out. Can you come get Simon and me?”

“Yeah, of course. Sorry I haven’t already left, sweetie. Your mother and I had a late night, what with the party, and your phone call just woke us up.” 

“Okay,” I said. “But you’ll come soon?”

“Of course, sweetie,” said my father. 

“Thanks,” I said, and then I hung up. 

It was a long, long wait for my father. I didn’t move back into the driver’s seat until I caught sight of my father’s blue SUV coming down the road toward us, but, even in Simon’s lap, I was shivering. We both were. We didn’t talk, except for when Simon said he had a crick in his neck and he’d never slept anywhere so uncomfortable. 

My father was able to spell the snow away from the whole ditch, including my car—he’d always had more power than either Mother or me—and then it was easy to drive back to the road, which was navigable enough now that it had been plowed. I wished I had coffee, but my father put an alertness spell on me before letting me follow him home, and that worked almost as well. 

Once we got back to my house, I trudged upstairs and collapsed onto my bed without waiting to find out what my parents were going to do with Simon, who hadn’t packed or anything. The less I had to do with Simon for the rest of break—for the rest of _ever_ —the better. I didn’t hate him, but it was possible one or both of us would die of awkwardness if he stayed here for the next two weeks.


End file.
